Umineko Project

Hi there,

This message is intended for those who are dedicating their free times to deliver this wonderful project.

People call me Bone and I am from Vietnam. I am a big fan of Umineko since 2010, partly because I've watched the Higurashi anime. I got introduced to anime while I was going to college in the States in 2008. I was lonely in my dorm room and my cousin sent me a link to watch anime online. Since then, my life alone in the States got brightened up. Few years later, I got to know doujin, starting from the Touhou Project. I got to know about the doujin community in Japan, what they do, how they help each other, how they spend their lives to produce unrefined yet beautiful gems, etc.

Of course, I knew about piracy. For a college student who was working part-time to earn just enough money to pay half their tuition, I resorted to piracy to get what I want most of the time. I am not really proud of that, I even used to think that was normal... However, that is not what I wanted to talk about in this message. I salute y'all for your effort in fighting piracy while working on this project. It is not perfect, I agree, but it shows that you want to support the developers in anyway you can.

Now that I have a job with steady income, I can afford for my hobbies. I already played all Umineko games before using the patches from Witch Hunt. Long story short, I decided to play them all again with you guys' amazing patch. And for that, I also have the chance to support the developers. Thank y'all for this chance! I used to think of buying the PS3 version but my Japanese was not good enough (still not good ) so I gave up on that idea. I have ordered the PS3 game from HMV. It will take at most 6 weeks to arrive here since it is not currently in stock. Luckily I have moved back to Vietnam so the shipping is way cheaper compared to staying in the States.

You guys may consider yourself normal and ordinary people, but to me, you're awesome! Keep up the good works! It will take some time for me before I can enjoy your effort on this project (I really hope they re-stock the game soon) so just take your time to work on other episodes. But don't take too long though

Best regards from Vietnam,
Bone

Hi, Bone, and thank you for your support, in every sense

I'll write my own reply -- I speak for myself here.

Thank you for sympathizing with our position and imperfect solution. It's truly hard for me to accept your praise without thinking about what other choices we could have made, what else we could have done.

Given our choice to go this route, I'm hesitant to decry piracy too loudly. I don't feel we're in a position to take the moral high ground. We do want to support the creators, but don't want to be seen as hypocrites.

So we've landed on this bizarre middle-ground, which despite eschewing the hard issues we would otherwise be forced to navigate, is itself far from ideal. If only it was easier for people to actually give money to the people we want to support, but they seem to reject it at every turn. Umineko PS3 is hard to come by, especially Chiru, and Alchemist never put it on PSN. The original Umineko PC games are down from the Japanese digital stores last we checked. And Ryukishi's recent all-ages novel Iwaihime is only available digitally from DMM, which has region blocks, or physically from Toranoana (where you have to use an external forwarding service, debit cards and PayPal aren't accepted, there's an 18+ requirement, and worst of all, it's actually unavailable to order there at the time of this post even if you wanted to jump through the hoops).

Everything is so complicated and unideal...

In any case.

It may be hard to get money to where it's meant to go in this particular case, but I thank you greatly for supporting our hobby If you have money set aside for entertainment, spending it into the smallest niches, the underappreciated and minor products and genres, where your individual purchases make the most difference, and help to fund diversity, seems like the best way to go about things

As for not taking too long... that's at the front of our minds, believe me.

Let me at least say that you can expect Episode 3 to be out before the game arrives.